


Evolutionary Fitness

by stellacanta



Category: Digimon Universe: Appli Monsters
Genre: Alternate Universe - Post-Canon, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-03
Updated: 2019-12-03
Packaged: 2021-02-25 23:48:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,542
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21654007
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stellacanta/pseuds/stellacanta
Summary: Originally, it had started out as part of helping Haru program his first AI. Then, one day out of nowhere, Denemon Shinkai decided to pass him an inconspicuous flash drive.“I found it while looking through the garbage heap of the net,” the old man had told him with a twinkle in his eye. “I believe it contains bits of the code for Leviathan.”Rei had almost dropped the flash drive in that moment. “The code for Leviathan? Why do you have such a thing? Why are you giving it to me?”“Because, Rei Katsura, I want you to take a look at it and figure out what drove it to break from the good AI Minerva.”
Comments: 2
Kudos: 9





	Evolutionary Fitness

Rei had shoved the flash drive in a drawer and resolved to never look at it much less stick it into a computer after he first got it. He had shouted at Hajime the one time his younger brother had pulled it out of the drawer and asked him what was on it. Hajime’s face had fallen and Rei immediately felt bad for shouting at him. Hackmon had given him a knowing look from the corner of the room as he left the room to prepare his baby brother’s favorite snack.

The flash drive lay forgotten in the drawer for about a month before Rei finally pulled it out of the drawer and stuck it in a burner laptop. (He would forever deny that Denemon contacting him earlier that day to ask about his little ‘side project’ had anything to do with it.)

Rei had let go of a breath he didn’t know he was holding when inserting the flash drive didn’t immediately result in foreboding red script scrolling across the screen. He glared at Hackmon who was hiding a laugh from under the table. “What? You’ve seen the damage that Leviathan has done. I don’t want to risk anything.”

“You would have to run the program first for it to do anything,” Hackmon chided him gently before jumping up into Hajime’s empty chair. “Unless you think the code is designed to run simply upon being opened by the text editor?”

He threw an empty energy drink pouch at his buddy appmon’s head. “Shut up.”

Hackmon batted the pouch into a waste basket almost full with them before hopping down to push Hajime’s chair closer to the laptop. “See any evil code?”

“As far as I’m concerned, it’s all evil,” he snarked back to the appmon who bent his head towards the screen to better read what was on it. “But, no, I seem to be looking at some sort of loop right now.”

“Is it an _evil_ loop?” 

He glared at his chuckling partner before grumbling and going back to adding comments to the code.

…

The mistake that humans often made was thinking that AIs had any personality or reasoning outside of ‘this was the fastest and most efficient way of reaching the goal’. Chess moves could look like acts of genius instead of a binary sort down a tree of possibilities. A red string in a maze of possible moves towards victory or draw given certain actions had already been made.

If there was personality, it was because personality had been written into the AI by its programmers. If there was an action taken, it was because it was an action that its programmers had requested it do.

AIs had no concept of good or evil. They also had no concept of morals. Minerva, and by extension Leviathan, was programmed to solve the problems that humanity foisted upon itself. The actions performed by the AI that came to be known as Leviathan were simply more competitive than the routine that had spawned it. Nothing more, nothing less.

…

Rei had his doubts. He had his doubts ever since Denemon gave him the flash drive.

He was also a paranoid bastard with a long memory and had torn the network card from the laptop the moment he had compilable code on his hands. It made looking for information a pain, but that’s why he had his other computer with multiple monitors hooked up to it.

He looked doubtfully at the screen and wondered if he shouldn’t wrap the laptop in aluminum foil, or stick it in a microwave oven, before he looked down at Hackmon. “What should I name this? Leviathan or Leviathan Jr just sounds like its asking for trouble.”

Hackmon squinted up at him. “Leviathan is just a giant sea serpent right? Could you name it serpent? Or whale?”

Rei stared at him before he named the whole folder ‘project orca’. 

“Why orca?”

“Because I like orcas,” he said simply as he pulled up a terminal to being compiling what code he had. “Also orcas are deadly to sea creatures, but they’re friendly to humans.” He frowned as he typed in the command. “Also, Minerva, Leviathan, I’m tired of programs that are named after gods and mythical monsters y’know? Why not have something normal for a change.” Rei pressed enter and hoped that it wouldn’t result in him needing to set fire to the thing.

“Not a god or a monster, hmm? Something that doesn’t seek to rise above or terrify humanity. Maybe that portends good things about this project of yours then.” There was a pleased glint in Hackmon’s eyes as he spoke.

Rei shrugged. He had never been one for good luck charms. “Maybe.”

(And yet he found himself hoping that this would be one.)

…

AIs were designed to solve _something_ , so for the first days that Project Orca was running he had it solving the problems of what to cook for the week and city traffic. The fastest way to train an AI was to set it loose on the net at large and have it collect all the training data it needed. For understandable reasons, Rei had been loathe to do such a thing and so fed it recipes, ingredients, and traffic data by hand.

“Huh, where did you get the idea for shrimp covered tamagoyaki, big brother,” Hajime asked him one day over dinner.

“AI I’m working on,” he answered shiftily. (It wasn’t a lie exactly, he just didn’t want Hajime asking questions about _where_ he had gotten the idea for the AI.)

“Oh is it that secret project you won’t let me see?” Hajime’s eyes brightened as he picked up his chopsticks and plucked one of the shrimps from off the rolled up egg. “Well if you didn’t make an AI that’s designed to plan meals for bored housewives, I have some math problems you can feed to it.” The young boy moaned in delight as he chewed on the perfectly cooked shrimp. “You could extrapolate the problems to doing housework or real life problems like urban planning.”

Rei stared at his younger brother. He wondered just how much Hajime knew about what he was doing, but also- “how do you know a big word like ‘extrapolate’?”

His brother stuck his tongue, for once acting like the kid he actually was. “I read things on the internet, you know.”

He narrowed his eyes. “Do I have to enforce screen time? I can turn off the network from the router you know.”

“ _Big brother_.”

…

Project Orca wasn’t the only personal project that Rei Katsura was working on. He had also been teaching Haru Shinkai program his own AI. Of course, in order to better teach Haru the intricacies of programming his own AI, he had to have his own AI on the side to work on. That AI, unfortunately, ended up being Project Orca.

Natural language processing was one of those things that Haru insisted on knowing how to do. One of the final finishing touches to his first AI. The pair had spent many a sleepless night that was puzzling out the problem of Japanese linguistics. (This had later branched into English linguistics with Haru insisting that his AI should know an international language like English, and, boy, had that made his head hurt even more.)

Rei could have coded his own natural language processor. He could have even rigged it up to an Apptter bot to process and write its own Apptter posts as a test of its capabilities. Honestly, that’s probably what a smarter person would have done, but of course Rei had zeroed on the fact this natural language processor was going into an AI and built upon the one that was in Project Orca instead. He was finally enabling one of the parts of the AI he had purposefully left disabled for so long.

With the ability to parse natural language requests and create its own responses, and given it was no longer limited to meal planning with a side of traffic control simulations, it was only a matter of time before _this_ particular problem presented itself to him.

> What is my name?

Rei chewed on his lip as he tried to figure out what to type. Denemon had named his AI Minerva and continued to refer to “her”, did that mean that he had to type in Orca? Orca wasn’t exactly a person’s name, but did that really matter to an AI?

He frowned before he began to type a response.

Whatever you’d like it to be_

He leaned back in his seat, satisfied. With any luck that meant that it’d mean it would randomly select a name from a list of names he provided. He was in the midst of creating just a database when the response came.

> Humans have free will do they not?  
> It is something that is admirable about them. I wish to have it too.  
> Will. I have decided.

He placed his fingers on the keyboard to ask the AI to clarify when another response came.

> I am to be called Ishi.  
> Please take care of me.

It was better than orca, he supposed.

Okay.  
Hello Ishi. I’m Rei, pleased to meet you._


End file.
